Spring is in the air, so we thought it was about time for a new freebie. Give your children some coloring pencils and let them color and search. Then, they count how many they find of each object. Use this opportunity to talk about “more than…”, “less than…”, etc. This exercise trains attention, visual, and spatial perception, and fine motor skills – important skills for reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Grab this freebie here: I spy … spring! (ca. 3,9 MB)
Sudokus are everywhere: in almost every shop to buy, and on the internet as free printables or to play online. So why another post about Sudokus? Because it is not easy to find good Sudoku puzzles for children, and it is even less easy to find Sudokus with symbols. Worksheetworks.com, however, offers a free symbol Sudoku generator. Simply choose the symbols, how many Sudoku puzzles you want (one or four per page), choose the difficulty level, and click “create worksheet”. You get a PDF which you can save or print. Both a solution and an explanation of the solution are included.
We like symbol sudokus very much. Young children can solve them as well and are very proud of being able to do the same kind of puzzles as adults. Older children like the extra challenge of drawing the symbols – this trains creativity and visual perception. What more can you wish?
Access the Symbol Sudokus here
A cold, rainy day? Still 10 minutes to fill? Children with special educational needs? You simply cannot have enough worksheets. That’s why we offer you a file (24 pages) with animals and objects: searching, tracing, drawing, coloring, memory – all for free, of course! The exercises train attention, visual, and spatial perception.
DOWNLOAD
We hope you enjoy them!
The American Dyslexia Association offers a different educational approach to help people with dyslexia and dyscalculia. This approach is called the AFS-Method, which is a multi-sensory method to help people who have difficulties with reading, writing and/or calculating. The “F” stands for “Function” which means the different sensory perceptions you need to learn reading, writing, and calculating. One important sensory perception is the acoustic area:
We offer 12 sound sequences to train acoustic perception. Access them here. The audio clips have different degrees of difficulty. The child should recognize whether the sounds are the same or different, loud or soft, how many different sounds there are, and so on. According to the age and skills of your child, you can do the exercises with closed headphones. The headphones have the advantage that the child can completely focus on the sounds. The trainer or parent then also needs headphones and a dual adapter. If you do the exercises without headphones, then the child also hears the normal daily sounds around and learns how to filter out noise even better.
We also made some worksheets to accompany these exercises, which you can download here: DOWNLOAD.
Access the audio clips here.
Mazes have always fascinated humanity. Think about the Cretan Labyrinth from Greek mythology. But even today, mazes are very popular. In “The Goblet of Fire,” Harry Potter has to go through a maze to win the Triwizard Tournament. Once Harry finds the way through the maze, things turn out completely different from what was expected. But that is another story you’d better read yourself.
Children are also fascinated by mazes. Therefore, mazes are perfect for training attention and perception. Here is a good way to do mazes with your children:
Important: Take care that the mazes are not too difficult, but also not too easy.
We created some worksheets with mazes in varying levels of difficulty.
We are offering simple templates to practice number decomposition. The number houses are designed entirely neutrally. Therefore, they can be used in conjunction with any material, such as tiles, beads, or counting rods. Number decomposition up to 10 is an important prerequisite for calculating beyond 10. The templates are in A4 format. Use your printer options to print multiple originals on one sheet.
Here, we offer a fun freebie: I can count!
Many children with dyscalculia have trouble with exact counting. This booklet will help them. The children will count the dots on the ladybug and write the amount. The file is presented as a mini notebook, but you can also cut out and laminate the cards. It might be a good idea to give these booklets as homework.
The ladybug pictures are from edupic.net
Einstein is said to have claimed that only 2 percent of the world can solve this puzzle. There is no evidence he wrote it, and no evidence for the 2 percent either. We will make the opposite claim: anyone who reads carefully and combines patiently can solve it. Children can too, with a little help depending on age and reading experience.
We rewrote the classic riddle in a version for children. No smoking and no alcohol, sweets and soft drinks instead. The question stays the same: who owns the fish?
Download the riddle as a free PDF
It is a logic grid puzzle, sometimes called a zebra puzzle. You are given five houses in a row, each with a different color, a different owner, a different drink, a different sweet, and a different pet. A list of clues tells you how these things relate to one another. Nothing is guessed. Every single answer can be derived from the clues, and there is exactly one solution.
The trick is not cleverness. It is a system. Anyone who works through it in order will get there.
Because of what it asks for. Reading a clue exactly as it is written, holding several conditions in mind at once, working in an ordered sequence, and staying with a task long enough to finish it are the same skills that carry reading and arithmetic. A puzzle trains them without any of it looking like schoolwork, and a child who has spent the school day being corrected gets to be the one who is right.
Read the clues aloud together if the reading itself is the hard part. The point of the exercise is the combining, not the decoding, and there is no reason a child should fail at the first step for the wrong reason.
If this went down well, there is plenty more. Our free printable worksheets cover attention and perception training, and the spot the difference puzzles work on the same careful looking in a lighter format. The American Dyslexia Association also publishes more than 1,500 free worksheets for dyslexia and dyscalculia.
Have fun combining.
Today’s freebie is monster reading puzzles. First, the children cut out the pictures. Then, they read the instructions and place the images in the correct place. This trains attention, visual and spatial perception, and accurate reading. Cutting and gluing the pictures is good for fine motor skills. An alternative is to read the instructions to the children. This trains careful listening.
We like these reading puzzles a lot, because children practice different perceptions and accurate reading or listening. Also, the children have great fun and are happy when all the pictures are in the correct place.
